THE FLAME OF TRANSFORMATION TURNS TO LIGHT is a book of poems in traditional ghazal form, the first half begun in Turkey, companion volume to "open form" poems written at a later visit, published in 2006 as Love is a Letter Burning in a High Wind (The Ecstatic Exchange). Visiting the epiphany-inducing tombs of Mevlana Rumi and his spiritual companion Shems in Konya, their baraka bathing the journey, the grave of Turkey's great native Sufi poet, Yunus Emre, and traveling through a land of such subtle spirituality, these poems chronicle an imagistic diary through both interior and exterior countrysides, with the second half continued in the same vein at home in Philadelphia.

Eternity shimmers in the room among the bright solid furniture that is the furniture of Eternity the bookcases and lamps the bed I wake from and the sound of the silence here that is its child the swirling ocean of time washing us in its blessings in constant motion of cylinder within cylinder of intangible turning invisible to the touch in which we age minute by minute inwardly forward but motionless in Eternity impossible to calculate except in angelic terms whose bright silver dazzles the mind beyond its usual earthly limitations whose walls and doors and streets and skies are sweetly blasted apart by the dimensions of Eternity and we live in it unbeknownst to us else we'd faint at the pure nothingness we are and God's Magnificence always facing us beyond even Eternity's confines and paltry measurements to show us anything but His resplendent Face in absolutely everything that is in its instant of being

MILLENNIAL PROGNOSTICATIONS: This is not a book of poetic futuristics, oracle-like I-Ching countings or consciousness Tarot readings, nothing so formal nor formulated. Perhaps its "prognostication" aspect is in trying to be open-hearted and sense-aware of images and their meanings, or meanings and their images, as they occur in the world both most immediate to us and by extension universal and even cosmic, detail by detail, focusing on what Blake called "minute particulars." It's a kind of lengthy prayer with sidebars, digressions and returns, hopefully each time more earnestly to the Source of all and of Whom, as it was said by the Prophet Muhammad, peace of Allah be upon him, "Do not curse time, for time is Allah..."

SHAKING THE QUICKSILVER POOL: Poems that point to Infinite Beauty (The Book of Infinite Beauty being the too ambitious previous title of this collection), which is only Allah, al-Jamal, Who created everything out of love in a balance of Beauty and Majesty, two attributes sometimes clearly manifest, sometimes at odds with each other, as seen by our clouded human perceptions. But behind every event and every creation, is that Infinite One, and the quicksilver pool is our total existence here, which, to focus more intensely, we might give a shake (our selves), to see God's Face in the things we see...

The luster of a glisten is/enough to elicit bliss//The gleam from a beam/enough to confound the intellect//The crack of a rock in a creek/can take us back to where//we lost track//The whiff of a sniff can lift/even the most morose heart//from the hotbed of heartbreak//All these phenomena/splinter and splatter in//this world to focus from the/unseen world onto this one//some hint of the high rainbowing/laughter to come...

In all the human spiritual paths there are stories of great men and women of divine gnosis who die in states of exaltation, sweet relief, or harmonious blending with the Next World that is more of a pause, almost a whisper. And their deaths, while entering holy silence, bring into stronger emphasis their erstwhile presence among people as teachers and examples of true humanity and sincere piety, as if their own lives are proof-positive of Godâs merciful existence, and their deaths simply a continuing chapter in the Great Adventure. // There are poems about roses blooming on rose-stems/rising and swaying in an air of delirious voices//Love Lord is the fertile earth Your rich compost/black soil of death and disaffiliation that/precedes growth

THE MUSIC SPACE, written in 2001, is a series of poems most acutely attuned to the sounds of our universe, composed for the most part while traveling back and forth to New York, unexpectedly ending with the world-transforming events of 9/11, completing in an apocalyptic way an unforeseen circle. This is the music space where music is most difficult this place of joy and horror. I think the music of the spheres can be heard in this space. And the original sound is the sound of God alone audible to Himself and we are the humming elements of that sound.